World's most distracted driver?

A 29-year-old woman in Torrance, CA, has been arrested for driving on the 405 freeway while texting on her cellphone, with a kid in the back seat without a seatbelt, another kid in the back seat in an unsecured child seat, and an infant on her lap, while her license was under suspension.

At least one other driver on the road spotted the woman chatting and texting on her phone with the baby on her lap and contacted the police. When she was pulled over, she was still holding onto the baby, presumably because it would be cruel to put him in the glove compartment.

"Her excuse was that, while she was driving on the 91 Freeway near Compton, the 1-year-old started crying and in an effort to comfort the 1-year-old, she pulled the 1-year-old to the front seat," a police department rep tells CBS Los Angeles.

Was all set to just have an enjoyable rage out at an idiot driver, but got distracted by the politics. Always good to see the baby farming skank trope is still dragged out regularly. Explain to me why the “scantily clad” comment was remotely necessary? Or how many kids she has? OOOOOH that’s right – have to add slutty brood sow to the list of offenses to really make sure we know how worthless she is. wtf >_<

This reminds me of the time I started getting text messages from someone who obviously had the wrong number. I tried calling the person to tell them they had the wrong number and I started getting texts that said, “QUIT CALLING I CANT TALK IM DRIVING”.

She couldn’t talk on the phone while driving but she could text. And argue. When I sent her a text that said “WRONG NUMBER” she sent a lengthy reply about how she knew her friend hadn’t changed her number so I was the one who was mistaken. I didn’t make any further effort because I was afraid of indirectly putting other people in danger.

They tried really hard to make a video story out of this headline, but besides repeating the headline, and then creating a visual story to explain the headline again, and then going on more to reiterate the headline, not sure why the video was so long. Not much else going on besides the headline.

She was actually doing all of us a favor as she was very successfully going to perform her own survival of the fittest experiment involving her children. It’s too bad it was ended prematurely because 18 years later this shit will be happening again times 3.

If she hit you and you are wearing your seat belt you’re car will be transformed into a twisted piece of useless sheet metal but you will most probably come out unscathed. Her car will be transformed into a twisted piece of sheet metal and inside the cab her children would become a blender mixing the insides up nicely.

So yes, she could possibly harm you, but not any more than the rest of the collection of assholes tailgating each other on the freeway constantly.

Sadly, this is far from the worst example of distracted driving. As awful as this lady is, she’s not even in the running for “most distracted driver”.

And it will continue to be this way until as a nation we get serious about driver responsibility. Today, a driver can kill a person through their recklessness and get away scot-free with a $40 traffic ticket.

Penalties need to match those that exist for the same outcomes for non-driving offenses, and we need to treat driving like the privilege it is, rather than as an “unalienable right” as we do now. Much more intensive driver training, both initial and recurrent, as well as stepping up enforcement and penalties (including taking away privileges for multiple violations, for greater lengths of time and for fewer violations than is the standard today).

(Bonus side-effect: by taking driving seriously, we would eliminate a significant portion of the motorists on the road, solving congestion problems in major cities without laying a single mile of new pavement).

People laugh at a person like the one in this article, or even call her out for being worse than average, but the fact is even the average driver is pretty damn irresponsible and poorly trained. Drunk driving is awful, but it’s shocking that about half of the deaths each year are caused by drivers who are stone-sober.

Unfortunately, the US is built around being able to easily transport yourself.

My solution is to add lower classes of driver’s license with maximum curb weights, and making the current driver’s license nearly as strict as a CDL.

So, you’d have a class that’s moderately strict that would give you Geo Metros, and then you’d have a class that’s the current lax standards that would give you European quadricycles (speed limited to 50 mph, power limited to around 20 hp, weight limited to around 800 lbs). Maybe no license would get you a light quadricycle (speed limited to about 30 mph, power limited to about 6 hp, weight limited to around 350 lbs), so you could still get to work even without a license, but a crash == you die.

This is the god’s honest truth. I was driving south from Temecula to San Diego one afternoon and passed a guy who was in the leftmost lane, going about 45 mph, with his feet propped up on the dash, a newspaper across the stearing wheel and strumming a guitar. No kidding….

I have seen a guy swerving in his lane on the 405, smoking meth (I assume) He had a lighter in one hand, a piece of aluminum foil in the other, a glass tube in his mouth, and he was steering his BMW with his knees.

Apparently, this type of people think it is their privilege to talk on the phone while driving. One time, I was honked and cussed out for slowing in front of a car because she didn’t notice me turn on the blinkers to park while she was talking on the phone.

Another time, a lady with a child in the back was driving 1-2 mph on the freeway offramp while talking on the phone, so I honked to get attention and passed her. She followed me to the supermarket parking lot, noted my licence plate, and called the police and I got a nice visit from an officer at home (who was nice to me, btw). It’s incredible.

She didn’t like being honked and being passed. The officer said she was a professor and wanted to know if I was a student (to that I wondered, so what’s she going to do if I was?). I guess there’s all kinds of bullies in this world.

Bicycle commuting in Melbourne I see things as bad as this almost every day. One guy went out of his way to overtake me on the wrong side while typing furiously on a laptop and then sat still in a right turn lane blocking me and other vehicles for the next five minutes still typing.

But how about the “scantily clad” bit from the newscasters? What this lady wears in pictures she puts on facebook has absolutely nothing to do with how she drives. An obvious and despicable use of slut-shaming.

This reminds me of a story the news channel I used to work at covered years ago: A French woman flies to Canada to retrieve the daughter her ex-husband had abducted months earlier and disappeared with. He was only caught because a cop passing him on the highway happened to spot the little girl laying on the back window sill of the car. He must not have known about the seatbelt law, fortunately!

The best (and by “best” I mean “WTF?”) part of this was the footage of her court appearance where she appeared to be incredulous that she was in trouble. Either that or she’s just perpetually confused.